Adobe Connect Pro 7

May 25th, 2008 by sridgway in Adobe Connect, TOL2ant2

See the rest of the images here

All the Adobe Connect coordinators from around the state attended an Adobe Connect training day held @ Ultimo College in the Wireless room DG-40 on Friday. The session was facilitated by Andrew Muller from webqem. Andrew gave us an overview of version 7 of Adobe Connect called Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro along with the new version & of Presenter. We should see this in TAFE NSW around July, and looks to have some enhancements and new features which will benefit staff & students using Connect.

Version 7 upgrade feature overview

New administration tools to control what pods and features are available to rooms. (not much use to TAFE here in my opinion)
Audio tools have been improved, the talk button has been moved to the bottom of the room onto the status bar independent of the camera & Voice pod. If you hover over a user in the attendee pod you can instantly grant them access to voip/video or allow them share their desktop. Although still available, it means you can do away with the camera & Voice pod if needed freeing up more screen real estate. Bad news is that you still have to grant users access to use voip or their camera but it has been made easier.
Breakout rooms have been added whereby a host can transfer groups of users from the main presentation room to breakout rooms for individual session work. The host can monitor and communicate with the breakout rooms and them bring everyone back to discuss the sessions. A useful teaching technique familiar to those who have attended TAFE workshops involving butchers paper :>
Thankfully the interface and bulk of features remain unchanged so it won’t be a steep learning curve for those who have been using version 6
There are many bug fixes and bandwidth optimisation improvements behind the scenes which is good nes for those who have been having problems, especially with screen sharing.
Support for Moodle in the winds, which is great news for those institutes using it as a LMS.
There is a new version of Adobe Presenter, version 7 which has lots of new features and enhancements. Not sure when we will see this in SI but it is available, we will endeavour to have it deployed to the Resource Development kits PC’s as soon as possible.

The session was very informative and it was a good test of the wireless room which performed faultlessly with 18 laptops all connected. The only snag was AIBE which keep asking for portal authentication every 15 min each time the Andrew moved from one platform to another. Off course being an outsider I had to hop up every time and enter my identity. How embarrassing … what a waste of money and interruption to our core business AIBE represents.

We will keep you posted here for developments and rollout dates of the new platform and Presenter.